20 Polymer Clay Tips and Tricks for Beginners #2

[Music] hi everyone it's Rachel and after receiving so many requests I've decided to make a part two of my polymer clay tips and tricks video I suggest that you also check out my other video too if you haven't already and I'll leave a link down below in the description box so today I will be showing and telling you about 20 things I have learned through my own experience and research about crafting with polymer clay some of the tips in this video are more simple and others are more advanced so I hope you learn something new either way also just to be clear I am in no way a professional at clay I just do this as a hobby in my spare time and everything I know is self-taught I strongly encourage you guys to always experiment and play around with different materials and techniques if you are ever unsure about something because that's how we learn best [Music] starting off yes you can make your charm or creation using polymer clay and not have to bake it straight away so many people always ask me if they can return to a charm that they didn't get to finish and yes you most definitely can that's one of the best things about working with polymer clay because it is oil-based and not water based it doesn't air dry so you can leave a half-finished piece and then come back to it when you're ready I quite often leave pieces for weeks before I feel motivated to finish them and that's perfectly fine another great thing is that you can make quite a few charms and then bake them all together in the oven not just one at a time as well as saving both power and time it is one of the most satisfying things to pull out a tray full of freshly baked charms if you have trouble with parts of your creations always breaking off particularly small or thin sections you can use wire and or liquid clay to secure those pieces to the main body of clay using wire inside your creations builds a strong reinforcement which also helps keep the pieces of clay stuck in properly from the inside using liquid clay on top of this will help to add even more strength and then you can just go ahead and bake your charms as per usual [Music] if you are making large pieces like figurines or different scenes out of clay something you can do is use aluminium foil as a base this will not only save clay it will also make your creation a whole lot lighter and as you can imagine a huge scene such as this forest one would become very heavy if I just use pure clay for the base I do recommend using liquid clay if you have it as this will help stick the regular clay sheets to the foil and if you were thinking about won't the foil make the oven explode your answer is no polymer clay gets baked in a regular kitchen oven or conventional oven and foil is designed for baking in these conditions anyway so you're most likely thinking of a microwave which polymer clay can't be baked in if you've been using polymer clay for a while now you've most likely built up a little collection of what we like to call scrap clay although this can be used normally or mixed together to create some really pretty shades I know that sometimes you're just not feeling it and you just want to get rid of it a great way to do this is to use scrap clay inside your creations or in a place that it won't be seen this booth uses it up and also saves you from using our whole heap of your favorite colored clay I quite often use scrap clay in some of my cupcakes or in the basis of my larger figurines another perfect use for scrap play is using it to clean I've been doing this ever since I started polymer clay and it honestly does wonders it makes a huge difference to the amount of dust that gets on my charms and you can use it to collect all the dust off your hands and fingers roll it on your work surface or just clean off little scrap pieces from your tools I like to keep one larger piece which is essentially just a mixture of a whole heap of little scrap pieces and then use it over and over again as you can see here it really does a great job of picking up the dust that gathers [Music] one popular brand of polymer clay is fimo and what you may not know is that if you flip the packet to the back you will actually find a clear sticky piece of plastic which is designed for sealing up the packet so that dust can't get onto the block you may have discovered this already and accidentally just thrown it out because you had no idea what it was but now you know did you know that you can use polymer clay to not only make creations but also make molds that can be used over and over again all you have to do is take the thing that you're wanting to make a mold out of and then some polymer clay you can use scrap clay if you're wanting to use it up take some cornstarch to prevent your piece from getting stuck into the clay and then go ahead and bake your mold when using molds made out of polymer clay it's best to stick to very simple and flat designs because the creation is a lot harder to remove compared to a flexible silicon mold one thing that may help is applying some cornstarch to the mold or to the clay that you're putting in the mold and this will help stop it from sticking another strange household item that you can use to make flexible molds is out of hot glue although I have to admit that I haven't made hot glue molds for ages now they were perfect when I was just beginning because they are cheap easy to make and you most likely already have the supplies that you need to make them I still use this Oreo one to this date which I probably made around five years ago so to make a hot glue mold all you'll need is your hot glue gun the item that you're wanting to make a mold off and a material to prevent them from sticking like cooking oil for example so all you have to do is heat your glue up apply the oil to the item and then simply layer the glue all over you'll then need to wait for around five minutes to make sure that the glue has completely cool before popping out the item the mold may also be slightly oily so you can go ahead and wash it under some water although the lifespan of hot glue molds isn't as long as silicon molds they definitely get the job done and you can easily make more if needed I always get a lot of questions asking how I'm able to put eye pins in so easily without squishing the shape of my charms and the answer is that before I put in the eye pin I make a hole using my needle tool I find that this gives me a lot more control over where I decide to place it and it also makes it a lot easier to actually make the hole because it's pointed on the end and not blunt like an eye pin another thing you can do if you have trouble with squishing your charm is that you can leave it to rest for a while or place it in the fridge to let the clay harden up slightly and then it's not completely squishy from the warmth of your hands I understand that a lot of people particularly beginners have a lot of trouble rolling out a mouth for a kawaii face or even just a thin coil of clay I find it easiest to roll coils of clay on a sheet of paper and this is actually how I do my mouth this is because the paper allows for a lot more friction so that the clay doesn't slip around on it and instead rolls out nicely this next tip is a little bit strange but I've actually found that using pearl colored clay or mixing in a small amount into your other colors helps to prevent fingerprints particularly with soft brands of clay like sculpey all you have to do is gently touch it and you can see a fingerprint the texture the pearl clay has doesn't seem to show up fingerprints as easily so if you mix this in you should notice less I usually mix in some pearl clay when I'm making a swirled frosting from an icing tip because then when I'm shaping it it doesn't show my fingerprints all become deformed when I handle it one trick that I've picked up on when I'm having difficulty blending pieces of clay together is using water this mainly only works for larger sections of play when you're trying to smooth out joins or creases all I do is take a small amount of water from the tap and I usually just use cold water but you can also use warm water then just dip in your finger and use the water to help make the clay nice and smooth down [Music] if you are having trouble with baking your clay pieces and they come out very flat on the bottom one thing you can do is bake them on top of some cornstarch this will help particularly round creations to keep their shape because they're not resting on the hard flat surface and then you can also keep the cornstarch and reuse it the next time you want to bake on it sometimes on our creations we like to create different mixtures using liquid clay for things such as deserts whether you mix in actual clay or just a powder pigment you can store any leftover mixture you have to use on your future creations you want the container to be airtight and I've found that the best type are these paint storage containers as I mentioned in my previous tips and tricks video clay can react with certain types of plastics and dissolve them so you need to be careful with the containers you select but I've never had any trouble with these type one thing probably a lot of crafters have noticed when working with translucent polymer clay is that after baking sometimes you can see these little moon shapes within the clay itself and we call this mooning or plucking as far as I know from our own experience and research there is no one way to avoid the ruining however I have seen some theories that claim to work for some people but not always others one way to try and avoid it is ensuring that your hands are completely dry when conditioning and working with the raw translucent clay some people believe that when the moisture gets into the clay from sweaty hands for example it can cause the mooning on the other hand I've also seen suggestions that the meaning has to do with baking temperature so really just try and find a way that works best for you because everyone has different results if you are ever wanting to create letters or cut any complex designs out of a thin sheet of clay a great way to be really precise is to do a pencil transfer on the clay all you have to do is draw your design on a sheet of paper in pencil making sure you do press a little harder than normal and then put this onto the clay and roll it gently the pencil will rub off onto the clay and then all you have to do is cut around your outline flip the clay over and then you have your perfect design [Music] a lot of people always wonder how I'm able to make a bunch of creations so similar and all the same size the way I do this is by rolling at a coil of my clay and then cutting off even sections rather than dividing the clay up straight from the block most at the time while cutting these sections I will just eyeball it but sometimes I will cut off one piece and then use it to measure the others to keep them all the same size [Music] another theory that has been floating around the polymer clay community for years is called quenching some people say that it makes a difference while others have also tested it and say that it doesn't do anything at all so the concept of quenching is that as soon as your charms are finished baking you place them straight into a bowl of ice water and this like snap calls them and apparently improves the strength I've tried it before and I haven't really noticed a difference in my charms and of course one of the downsides is that it washes off any chalk pastel shading that you've done one of the benefits though even if it's not true is that you can use the method to cool down your charms quicker and then begin working on them again [Music] I recently learned this hack from a youtube comment on one of my videos that suggested that when cutting shapes out of clay with a cookie cutter you can use a piece of glad wrap to keep the edges smooth and that way you don't need to go around and fix them up later I know that this technique is very popular in the baking community and it definitely also works well for clay too my last little tip for today's video is using scrap clay when shading donut charms I actually picked up this tip from an Instagram account called charming moon creations who puts clay around her donut charms and then shades them once you've finished shading you can then remove the scrub clay and it has a perfect unshaded line all the way around just like a real donut and they have it that is 20 more polymer clay tips and tricks that I have learned from our own experiences and research that I wanted to share with you please be sure to give this video a big thumbs up also don't forget to check out my first tips and tricks video if you haven't already you can subscribe to my channel for lots more crafty videos and I'll see you next time bye guys [Music] you

Channel: Creative Rachy

Views: 805,453

Rating: 4.970499 out of 5

Keywords: polymer, clay, craft, hacks, hack, easy, tutorial, beginner, 2018, 2019, DIY, sculpey, fimo, premo, charm, charms, collection, tips, tricks

Id: r9Ybfa-AguI

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 08 2018